


in your bedroom, during the war

by lupinely



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: First War with Voldemort, M/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-02
Updated: 2013-06-02
Packaged: 2017-12-13 16:47:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/826545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lupinely/pseuds/lupinely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s the bed, there’s the room, and there’s Remus. This, at least, Sirius knows for sure. </p><p>(The first war. Remus changes. Sirius suspects.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	in your bedroom, during the war

 

 

 

 

 

 

Start with the bed.

It’s near sundown, and the light through the windows streams in thin and gold. The bed is bare, and Sirius still hasn’t bought any sheets yet. Remus grouses about it daily but hasn’t gone to sleep anywhere else, so Sirius supposes it’s all right, really. If it actually did mean something, Remus would tell him.

There’s a bed, and there’s Remus, and Remus is already asleep, the pull of the moon from the previous night still lingering in his bones, a malaise. Remus goes in and out like the tides: some days he smiles like he was never meant to do anything else, and other days he sits by the windows, reads the same book so many times that the pages are tattered. Aloud, he wishes it would rain. Sirius can’t imagine why. When it rains, the whole apartment smells like wet dog, and Remus’ nose wrinkles in on itself as Remus watches Sirius shake the rain from his hair.

But right now it’s sunny, and Remus is sleeping, and Sirius stands in the doorway watching the shadows grow longer on the walls.

No—that’s not right, is it. Remus isn’t here.

Sirius blinks. He doesn’t know what time it is. It’s too dark to see and the stars outside are covered by clouds. It might be approaching dawn; it might not yet be midnight.

He is awake, because Remus is not there. The room echoes the absence, the same way silence echoes the last sound that precedes it. Remus has just left, then.

Or maybe not. Maybe he has always been gone.

 

 

-

 

 

Sirius is twenty when he thinks he kills someone for the first time. James is nearly twenty-one. A killing curse flashes by James’ left ear, and Sirius just barely hears it pass, quiet as the faint, intimate sound of fingertips sliding on bare skin.

The rules on Order members killing Death Eaters are—deliberately, Sirius thinks—rather unclear. They aren’t supposed to use _Avada Kedavra_ , the Cruciatus, or the Imperius. People do anyway, though. It’s a war they’re fighting. They are not in the hallways of Hogwarts anymore, jinxes cast as pranks so that someone’s underwear showed, or their face turned neon green.

James goes underground with Lily and Harry not long after the following: Sirius kills the Death Eater who tried to kill James, and he doesn’t feel bad about it. It is the most powerful spell he’s ever cast—he tastes the magic in the words as he says them, a wet gunmetal glow in the back of his mouth that he recognizes as blood.

James hides, but Sirius doesn’t. He kills again and it’s not his last. He kills more times, probably. He’s not sure how many. Dumbledore looks at him with weary, silver eyes, but he doesn’t tell Sirius to stop.

 

 

-

 

 

He kisses Remus against the wall, drags his fingertips over Remus’ hipbones, trying to pull him closer whereas Remus refuses to be moved, the long length of his spine arched away. Sirius slides his fingers under the hem of Remus’ shirt and up his back, presses them like bullet points into Remus’ shoulder blades. Remus bites Sirius’ lower lip, hard, so hard that Sirius tastes blood again. He wants to laugh, but it comes in a sob, and Remus swallows it.

“Shut up,” Remus whispers. His fingertips are gentle at the line of Sirius’ jaw, and he licks the last traces of blood from Sirius’ mouth.

“Come to bed,” Sirius begs him; “Moony, come to bed,” and Remus does. Remus fucks Sirius into the mattress, which has got sheets now, Sirius realizes, dimly, not quite sure how it happened. Sirius digs his heels into either side of Remus’ spine, runs his hands up Remus’ forearms. Remus mouths against Sirius’ neck but he doesn’t say anything. They haven’t said anything to each other in a long time.

There are too many questions that Sirius wants to ask, too many things that he wants to say. He opens his mouth and nothing but a whine comes out. Remus drags his mouth over Sirius’ lips, sloppy-rough, while his right hand moves between them and he thumbs the slit of Sirius’ cock.

Stop hiding from me, Sirius thinks, suddenly angry, suddenly _furious,_ but that’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Remus isn’t hiding from him at all. Remus is right here. Remus with his hand on Sirius’ dick and his mouth on Sirius’ neck, and Sirius’ heels constellated in his lower back.

It takes Sirius forever to come. He knows, on a basic, unspoken level, that once he does Remus will fall asleep and so will Sirius and when he wakes in the morning, Remus will be gone.

Remus keeps sliding his hand up and down Sirius’ cock after he’s finished fucking him, the condom tossed aside. He twists his hand the way he knows Sirius likes it best, without warning. Sirius bucks up into his touch, helplessly. He feels like an out-of-body experience, as if he’ll look down and see Remus jacking off his empty shell, slick-mouthed and vacant and hollow shells for eyes. It’s sick. It's not precisely a metaphor.

Remus puts his fingertips under Sirius’ chin and forces Sirius to meet his eyes, brushes his thumb over Sirius’ lower lip, briefly. Remus doesn’t look away once, not even when he lowers his head and takes Sirius into his mouth and finishes him off that way, the slide of his tongue and the twist of his left hand, the delicate scrape of his teeth and the intense long gaze of his bright, faraway eyes.

Remus crawls up beside him on the bed after, finally. He nuzzles against Sirius’ neck. “Stop thinking so much,” he says quietly, and Sirius nearly laughs. That is what Sirius is supposed to say. That’s what he has always said, and Remus has always stared back at him, slightly bemused, before twisting his lips into a self-conscious little smile and coming in Sirius’ mouth.

“Let’s play truth or day,” Sirius says. “I’ll go first.” He is still half-breathless, the down-winding pulse of his heart too fast beneath the skin of his wrists, his throat. He feels sticky, sweaty all over; it’s too hot for early summer, the stark heat of July coming too fast.

Or at least he thinks it’s early summer. When he blinks, it might be mid-fall. The light changes.

“Truth or dare, then,” Remus asks, playing along.

“Truth.”

Remus kisses the hollow of his throat. “You never pick truth.”

Sirius knows this. He says, his voice a rasp: “I do this time.”

Remus falls asleep, his breath measured against Sirius’ neck, his fingertips just barely touching the hollows of Sirius’ ribs. Sirius runs his hands over the scars on Remus’ arms, his back, his hipbones, cataloguing them all. Remus hates this, tenses whenever Sirius does it, but always humors him because he knows Sirius likes the feel of the marks beneath his fingers: Remus’ own historical topography.

When Sirius wakes that morning, Remus is gone.

 

 

-

 

 

“Is it Remus, do you think?” James asks.

He sounds scared. That is all that Sirius can think about, for a moment; James Potter, all of twenty years old, already a father, and he sounds like a little kid. His voice wavers. James never wavers.

Sirius is silent for a long time. Saying it out loud makes it real. Saying it out loud means that something fundamental and irreplaceable is broken, and that he will never be able to get back. Saying it out loud means that Remus probably doesn’t love him, and maybe never did.

Sirius licks his lips. Start with the room, he thinks, and forgets what comes next. “It could be,” he says, and James buries his face in his hands. Sirius puts his hand on James’ shoulder, father to son. He doesn’t think about anything.

 

 

-

 

 

No one knows about Remus-and-Sirius. James and Lily and Peter all know that Sirius and Remus have lived together since a few months after the end of their seventh year at Hogwarts, but they don’t know about the rest of it. They don’t know what it was like in the beginning—when it was just the two of them, shut out from the rest of the world, their fingertips on each other’s mouths and that secret, half-hidden Moony smile at the corner of Remus’ lips, curled upwards. Sirius loves that smile more than anything else in the whole world. He used to think—wildly, insanely, when he didn't know what any of this even meant—that he would die for that smile.

Remus disappears a lot. Dumbledore has told Sirius briefly that it’s Order business, just like what Sirius is doing. Sirius doesn’t believe him. No one else does what Sirius is doing, because what Sirius is doing is going mad, apparently. He goes out and he tracks Death Eaters and he unravels complicated defensive spells because he’s got the gift: he can practically smell magic in the air when it’s nearby. It’s the Black blood in him. That old pureblood magic.

It’s not worth it, he thinks; this pureblood purity isn’t worth any of this, what Voldemort’s Death Eaters fight for. Sirius goes out and gets mud on his knees and catches his little finger on the loop of a powerful shield charm completely by accident. He pulls the whole thing apart all at once, and Death Eaters pop up before his eyes, their faces masked. The tips of their wands glow green. Sirius blinks, once, and then he’s home. He’s in the bedroom. He doesn’t know how he got there. Maybe he never left at all.

 

 

-

 

 

James and Lily make Peter the Secret-Keeper. They tell everyone else that it’s Sirius. It makes sense. Voldemort would come after Sirius first, anyway; he is James’ obvious first choice.

“Too bloody obvious,” James says. He keeps rubbing his palms over his knees, over and over.

Lily is pale-faced and utterly calm. She is eating raspberries one-by-one, staining her fingers red, but she does so automatically, as if she doesn’t realize what she’s doing.

“You’re going to get hurt, Sirius,” James says, softly.

Sirius’ mouth twists. Too late for that.

“I still think we should pick Remus if you won’t do it, Sirius,” Lily says. Her voice sounds as if she is talking about the grocery list, what to pick up for dinner.

James and Sirius exchange a look. Lily misses nothing, and stares at James, wide green-eyed. They are so goddamned young, Sirius thinks. He feels a thousand years older than either of them, which isn’t fair at all, because they are the ones living in hell right now, not him. What right does he have to their exhaustion, their fear?

But Sirius can feel his heart pounding in the base of his throat, taste the burn of gunmetal in the back of his lungs. “Swear to me that you won’t choose Remus and not tell me about it,” he says. “James."

He doesn’t give a fuck, at this moment, that Remus might be the spy. He thinks only of the Death Eaters going after Remus, of _Crucio._ Of Remus, dead. He wonders which would be worse: dead Remus, or secretly-working-for-Voldemort Remus? He hates himself for it.

James understands. James understands too much, maybe, and so does Lily, in the sharp keen slant of their gazes towards him now, unified. Sirius envies them their solidarity.

“We promise,” Lily says, quietly. “Peter it is,” and Sirius lets out the breath he has been holding, slowly between his teeth, as if if he exhales too quickly his ribs will crack.

 

 

-

 

 

“It shouldn’t be you,” Remus says. He is arcing under Sirius’ touch again, responding to the slow practiced movement of Sirius’ fingertips at the bottom of his spine, the curve of his thigh. “You’ll be in danger. It should be me, I’ll do it. Let—” His breath hitches when Sirius scrapes his teeth over his neck.

“No,” Sirius says, possessive and angry and terrified and so, so afraid of losing it all, of losing Remus, of losing everything. He can already feel it slipping away from him, unraveling like one of the spells that the magic in his blood has taught him to take apart. Nothing has ever taught him how to put something back together once it’s been broken. “It’s me, Remus. They chose me.”

The expression on Remus’ face is unreadable. His lips are parted, his eyes half-lidded, blank. Sirius leans in and kisses him so he doesn’t have to look anymore.

 

 

-

 

 

James and Lily send him a letter. It's short, only one line long. A warning. 

_Be careful with Judas._

They still don’t know for sure. He could be wrong. Maybe he is.

(If Sirius is wrong, eventually the truth will come out, and Remus will forgive him. Remus always forgives him, against all sense. And maybe Sirius will forgive himself. If he’s wrong, they can fix it, he thinks. Just as long as they have the chance.)

 

 

-

 

 

He has reasons for his suspicions. This is what he tells himself while he lies awake at night, alone. (Remus is gone again, so the room is empty. The ceiling fan scratches like a cicada from above. There’s the smell of petrichor, a remnant of the gentle rain early that morning.)

It’s not because Remus is a dark creature and prone, therefore, to darkness. Sirius is a Black, _toujours pur_ —if anyone’s prone to darkness, he is for sure. Sometimes he wonders, absently, how he can be so sure that he hasn’t succumbed to it already. He’s gotten a lot of people killed, and he knows, deep in his chest, that he’s not done doing that yet. (Sometimes he is no longer even a person, either, but an automaton: Dumbledore’s puppet, his rusting joints pulled by twisted wire strings.)

Remus has changed, is what it is. He is more quiet than ever, and the way he watches Sirius makes Sirius uncomfortable—as if the wolf is awake in Remus’ chest, hunting down a blood-scent, coming in for the kill. Sirius never used to be afraid of the wolf before.

But, then again—he’s not as young as he used to be. He’s just turned twenty-one years old.

"This isn't a game, Sirius," Remus had said once, and Sirius had just looked at him, cocked his head, let the grin over his mouth say everything he needed to say.

 

 

-

 

 

They are standing in the bedroom. The sun is high in the sky or low against the horizon: Sirius can’t tell. When he blinks, all the shadows shift. Remus is too close—he’s not close enough. He looks back at Sirius, unflinchingly, the brown of his eyes catching gold in the light.

“I’ll ruin everything eventually, you know,” Sirius says. It seems like the sort of thing that Remus should be told.

He is not sure when they are, whether they even _are_ at all. The bedroom looks the way it did when they graduated Hogwarts, before Remus moved in properly. That doesn’t mean anything, though.

Remus blinks. Then he reaches out and takes Sirius’ hand and looks at it, curiously, at the lines on Sirius’ palm and the potion stains on his knuckles from the bitter strength elixirs the Order has him drinking. He runs one fingertip along the outline of all of Sirius’ fingers, gentle enough to barely be felt.

“I hope this makes sense to you,” Remus says, finally. Then he kisses him.

It doesn’t.

 

 

-

 

 

James and Lily stay in hiding and send cryptic, ambiguous letters when they can. Peter takes their secret and carries it in the hidden untouched places behind his ribs, transcribed. Sirius is glad to watch him do it; Peter has always wanted to prove himself, especially to James. Here’s his chance. Sirius has faith in him.

It leaves him free to watch Moony, without guilt. Neither of them will be the ones to betray James and Lily and Harry’s secret to Voldemort. Not directly, at least. There’s a cold sort of comfort in knowing that. It's all he has.

 

 

-

 

 

In the beginning, it was like this.

There was the four of them: Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs. James was Sirius’ best friend, Peter followed along, and Remus was Remus. It’s not that Sirius didn’t think of Remus as a friend, but it was different, not the way it was with James and Peter. This hadn’t bothered Sirius at the time. He had sensed, half-consciously, that it might be important, but he was still young enough then to think that these things would solve themselves in time; that if it really mattered one way or another, someone would sit him down and patiently explain it all to him. (This person always sounded a lot like Moony in Sirius’ head, and Sirius liked to listen to his voice, so faintly hoarse at the edges.)

Remus had kissed him first, late in their seventh year. His lips were chapped, Sirius remembers thinking before Remus leaned away. Daring as a true Gryffindor, Sirius had said then, because he was incapable of doing anything else, shell-shocked as Remus looked at him, wholly unashamed and waiting to see what Sirius would do in response.

“Is that all?” Remus asked. “Shall I barricade myself in the prefect’s bath now so we never have to look at each other again, or shall I drop out of school entirely?”

“You’ve already told me the password to the bath.” Sirius looked down at Remus’ mouth. It was a nice mouth, he thought somewhat absently. His own lips were buzzing, not uncomfortably.

“Damn,” Remus said. He still wouldn’t look away, which Sirius thought was very brave of him. He was starting to smile.

“You aren’t having me on, are you?” Sirius asked. “James isn’t going to pop out from behind a tapestry as soon as I kiss you again?” It’s the sort of thing James would do, because of course James would notice the strange unnamed thing that was different with Sirius and Remus before Sirius realized it himself.

“Why?” Remus asked. “Does this seem funny to you?”

Sirius considered this. “You know,” he’d said, “it really sort of does,” and then he leaned in and kissed Remus properly. Remus had laughed into Sirius’ mouth, which is Sirius’ favorite part of this particular memory. If he had a Pensieve he’d replay that, over and over, but he’d never leave the memory in the bowl afterwards. He’d take it with him when he goes.

Sirius remembers the rest of it, too; what he is almost sure is all of it. They kissed behind the suits of armor in the hallways between classes, looked at each other over James and Peter’s heads and hid their smiles, roamed the Forbidden Forest together under the full moon, flicked ink at each other’s noses. Forgiven each other their trespasses, because the future—their future—was still so open and so free and so before them, not yet touched by all the things they still had left to lose.

 

 

-

 

 

There’s the bed, there’s the room, and there’s Remus. This, at least, Sirius knows for sure.

The shadows climb the walls. Sirius takes a breath. Remus is frowning at him. “Haven’t you heard?”

Sirius answers through a yawn: “Heard what?” He touches Remus’ wrist, pulls him over to the bed. He is calm as the bottom of the sea, as if some powerful aegis has settled over his heart at last, letting him loose.

Remus allows himself to be led. He lies straight on the mattress, his hands folded on his chest, and stares up at the ceiling.

Sirius watches him. “Everything’s all right, Moony. I promise you.”

Remus shakes his head, but he looks frustrated, as if he doesn’t know what he’s trying to say. The worry line between his eyes deepens. Sirius smooths it with the pad of his thumb.

“Sirius—” Remus starts to say, only Sirius says, “Hush,” and silences him with his mouth.

 

 

 

 

 

(He wakes up all at once, or maybe he doesn’t. He blinks at the ceiling, hazy, and remembers that it is Halloween. Outside, the sky is full of stars, stars, stars.

It takes Sirius a moment to realize, no, not stars—sparks. All across the countryside, witches and wizards raising their wands in the air and casting sparks over everything, so that gold and red and silver streaks light up the whole night sky.

Sirius gets out of their bed, which is empty, and he goes to find out why.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
